In Mexico, Crime Is The Story

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MEXICO CITY — The story here is the crime. The State Department warns of street robbers.

My hotel warns gravely against a Sunday jaunt to the Zocalo.

Practically any Mexican you meet (who does not travel under armed guard) has anecdotal evidence of a condition far beyond Washington's edgy norm.

A journalist tells of his three armed holdups and one kidnapping (15 hours in the trunk until his checks were cashed.)

Another resident knows ''tens'' of victims. Abductions by cabbies working with waiting toughs, sometimes police or ex-police, are a particular menace.

Kidnappings are an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 a year. Those with the option park their families out of harm's way and commute from, say, Dallas or Monterrey.

What causes this crime?

It maligns the poor to attribute it to economic conditions, President Ernesto Zedillo said, singling out ''a relaxation of ethical and legal standards'' and ''a failure of (law-enforcement) institutions.''

But police corruption is now declining, he reported.

This relatively benign explanation is challenged by what seems to me the consensus view.

First, of the 17 million Mexican people who are in extreme poverty, 7 million live in the swollen capital of this nation, so desperation is doubtlessly the engine of much crime.

The millions of Mexicans who fell out of the barely middle class in the brutal peso-devaluation shakeout of 1994-95 are suspect as a reservoir of perpetrators.

That shakeout, though hardly Mexico's first, surpassed anything Americans have experienced since the Great Depression.

The official response to the poverty lies in an economic program designed to restore job-creating growth.

The government purports already to have made up the peso-crisis job loss and to be near meeting the goal of adding at least as many jobs (a million) as the number of annual new entrants into the work force.

A Yale-trained economist, Zedillo gives credit for the evident recovery to his tax reforms' enhancing investment incentives, and especially to his signature attempt to finance expansion from domestic savings rather than from foreign loans.

Another matter figures in the crime analysis coming from a range of well-placed sources: politics but of different sorts.

The drug traffic, of course, continues to savage police effectiveness.

In a cruel twist, the otherwise laudable purging of a quarter of Mexico City's police has, as one businessman put it, ''put 1,200 hardened criminals on the streets.'' Police and judicial reform, Zedillo understands, are necessary but Sisyphean tasks.

Politics of another sort, however, is the most painful and elusive consideration at play. The way I get it, the 68-year-old ruling party, the PRI, long ran the cities machine-style, and kept crime - or at least crime that was not bought and paid for by PRI loyalists - within bounds. But the machines began to weaken, leaving the cities more exposed than ever just when American-fed drug demand surged.

Ideally, the PRI would have used its decades of uncontested power to shape the institutions of a just and law-abiding society. Instead, the party erased the crucial distinction between itself and the state.

Think-tank analyst Luis Rubio said it like this: It is not that corruption became the unfortunate side effect of the political system; corruption is the system. For loyalty, the party offered favors paid with government money and privilege.

In short, the weakness of law enforcement that is felt on the streets by the victims of common crime is the other side of the weakness of respect for law that makes multimillionaires out of former Mexican presidents and that makes the country's erstwhile highest figures and families suspects in the vilest political and drug-related crimes.

President Zedillo, I hasten to add, is in the universal view completely clean on the personal level. But he inevitably is touched by the cynicism bred by his party affiliation and by the dark charges that have enveloped his once similarly respected predecessor, Carlos Salinas.

If it is the party's reform or revolutionary inheritance that presumably attracted the likes of Zedillo, it is its insiders-club tradition that presumably draws in many others.